Rahm Emanuel returns to ChinaTalk with a characteristically blunt assessment of U.S.-China relations, delivering an unsparing verdict on the first year of Donald Trump’s second term.

We discuss:

The “Fear Factor” in Asia: Why Japan and South Korea are ramping up defense spending not because of Trump’s strength, but because his unpredictability and isolationism have forced them to buy “insurance policies” against a U.S. exit,

Corruption and “Own Goals”: How “draining the swamp” has turned into institutional degradation — and why the Trump family’s entanglement of personal business interests with foreign policy damages U.S. credibility and strategic leverage,

Adversary, Not Competitor: Why the U.S. needs to stop viewing China as a strategic competitor and start treating it as a strategic adversary — one whose win-lose economic model is designed to hollow out global industrial bases,

Education as National Security: Why tariffs are a distraction and the only real way to beat China is a massive domestic push for workforce training,

AI and Inequality: Rahm’s evolving thinking on artificial intelligence — why he’s still learning and why a technology that boosts productivity but widens inequality is a political and social risk.

Plus: prescient observations on Iran, why Ari Emanuel’s robot UFC idea might actually be sound policy, Rahm’s case that he’s now the real free-market capitalist in the room, and rapid-fire takes on J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and the 2028 Republican field.

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Mike Froman is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. Trade Representative. He joins ChinaTalk for the first time to discuss:

Why his 1992 dissertation on détente is suddenly relevant again – and why “positive linkage” fails to change adversary behavior,

How mutual assured destruction has shifted from nuclear weapons to rare earths, supply chains, and technology, and why the U.S. and China are stuck in a costly, uncomfortable stalemate,

Trump’s unorthodox use of economic leverage and America’s resilience problem,

CFR’s new cross-fellow initiatives on China, economics, and open-source analysis,

Plus: an inside look at how think tanks work — salaries, funding, and what to expect from Mike Froman’s tenure leading the CFR.

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We've got a full house with Tony, Justin and Eric today. We get into:

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Nathan and Jasmine debrief from NeurIPS San Diego, where we of course threw the best party.

outtro music: we're on a boat https://suno.com/s/dkulmuRvScACxObX

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It's never over with Trump...Dmitri Alperovich of the Silverado Policy Accelerator comes on to discuss Trump's decision to allow the export of H200s to china.

outtro music, a fan song to Jameison Greer: https://suno.com/s/yTi5R7xDRcM7p2ho

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Outtro music: https://suno.com/s/LwWifN1S39nlwYr5

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First half on the national security strategy you can read here https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

26:18 we get into the second strike

Tony's Taiwan baseball podcast rec: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6s26btM3CFq7FgUUmdECST?si=gMIOtaZxSPKYzk5qCNMePQ

Kimi said I should set the song to veggietales, so I did. https://suno.com/s/P4XaZR6f1mphSrkP

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It's think tank director week at ChinaTalk! Helen Toner of CSET kicks us off to talk through where she's planning on taking the storied organization.

her speech about jagged progress: https://helentoner.substack.com/p/taking-jaggedness-seriously

Outtro music: https://suno.com/s/HcdTS6W1OmHh8ZYz

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In the wake of Salt Typhoon, what does the future of secure telecom look like?

To find out, ChinaTalk interviewed John Doyle, a former Green Beret who spent a decade building Palantir’s national security practice before founding Cape, which calls itself “America’s privacy-first mobile carrier”. Also joining the conversation is Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman and co-founder of Silverado Policy Accelerator, founder of CrowdStrike, and an angel investor into Cape.

Thank you to Cape for sponsoring the episode.

We discuss…

Why telecom data is so valuable to adversaries, and what China discovered in the Salt Typhoon campaign,

Cape’s founding thesis, including what makes Cape’s cell network so much more secure than major providers like AT&T,

How wars are run on commercial cell networks, and how Russia and Ukraine’s reliance on that has been exploited over the course of the war,

Other instances of telecom data weaponization, including by Hezbollah, Israel, and Mexican drug cartels,

Taiwan’s plan for dealing with undersea cable sabotage,

What it takes to cultivate engineering talent in telecoms, and why Huawei has stayed innovative while US providers stagnated.

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Doug, Dylan, and Wei of SemiAnalysis join me (Jon was sleeping at 5AM taiwan time...) for a pre-holiday get together.

01:00 AI Mandate--OpenAI slipping

19:03 Dylan sells TSMC on AI better than sama

24:17 Doug teaches a lesson on railroad bubbles and ai

32:30 Sarah Friar fails up

35:17 Zohran-Trump

Suno slop: Moody's man came down from New York City https://suno.com/s/5DGCTgqam8dQMkZf

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